Bookish Thoughts: The Desire For Elsewhere
Book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32865050-the-desire-for-elsewhere
Goodreads synopsis: A girl who nearly meets with death while on board a plane from Paris to Marrakech; a boy who fills her arms with paper animals under the open skies of rural China; her doppelgänger whom she meets in the Middle East; a question she was once asked, and the answer she only finds three years after.
The Desire For Elsewhere takes you on an intimate journey to explore the interiors of the museum of the narrator's being, where otherwise ordinary artefacts reveal the stories they contain within. Travelling to the past, parallel planets, and the future, it tells a story of stories that explores the universal themes of love and loss, time and transience, and travel and wanderlust.
Enchanting and evocative, the tales of Agnes Chew transport you to places that run on lost time, missed opportunities, and deep-rooted aspirations. These are voyages fuelled by a sense of nostalgia, possibility, and hope. Ultimately, this debut collection raises fundamental questions on the ways in which we live our lives.
I am ashamed to say that I have yet to read a book by a local writer (by local I mean Singapore, where I’m from) and can hardly name more than 5 Singaporean writers off the top of my head. At the start of the year, I wanted to start reading a few local writers’ work as part of my goal of diversifying my reading. Well, although I only started finished one book so far and so late in the year, I’m glad that I got started at least.
The concept behind The Desire For Elsewhere is pretty interesting, and is also kind of misrepresented by the blurb. It’s a debut work by the author and “the sole creative nonfiction representative of the National Arts Council Mentor Access Project 2014/2015″, and is actually a collection of short essays and anecdotes describing and detailing the history behind certain “artifacts” within the “museum” of the author as “curated” by her, that (I quote) “illustrate the essence of our beings”. The contents of the book is split into 3 sections with a different theme, “Nostalgia” , “Parallel Worlds” and “The Vast Unknown”. I picked this book up among the others because I wanted to read more nonfiction and this book seemed great for that, and other local fiction titles available just simply didn’t interest me as much.
After having read the book, I have to say that while it was an ok read and I enjoyed it, it wasn’t for me and I didn’t like it as much as I thought it would, which might be because this is the first creative nonfiction I’ve read. This book is a personal introspection by the author on her experiences and the people she met in her travels (a lot of the essays in this book are travel anecdotes) so a lot of what she discusses is a little abstract and maybe slightly wishy-washy. The language used is very pensive, ruminative, and beautifully poetic as some points. However, I have to agree with other reviews on this book that sometimes it gets a bit too much, especially with word choice. Sometimes it feels like the author went out her way to choose the most difficult/convoluted vocabulary possible just to sound more perceptive, which is made worse when those words were used repeatedly. There were also a lot of rhetoric (much like a A level GP essay) and rhetorical questions, which I personally did not like (I prefer that they are used as sparingly as possible.) Obviously they were used to invite the reader to reflect together alongside the author, but I feel that it was used too excessively for my taste.
Regarding the contents of the book, not everyone will relate to the author’s experiences. This book, as evident from the title, is probably primarily inspired by the author’s wanderlust, which the author is privileged enough to be able to satisfy in various road trips, student exchanges etc, which is not a common experience shared by everyone. This is a sensitive topic to discuss, but I couldn’t help but feel the author’s privilege acutely especially in certain portions of the book. When she talks about how the people that she met on her travels “touched her life” for example, her description of the locals’ life and livelihood felt romanticized; one story in particular, Paper Animals, about an overseas community service expedition made me feel very uncomfortable. This is my personal reaction though, and it would be nice to hear the thoughts of others on this book.
(Side note, I really love the design of the book visually, in terms of the cover and end paper design, down to the size and font of the text.)
A post shared by @crooked.talks on Feb 22, 2017 at 9:04pm PST
